1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to tracking usage of social networks and particularly to a system and method for analyzing sequences of actions by a social media user when visiting a social networking site.
2. Description of Related Art
Companies have always been concerned about contents published on their websites. Companies provide sticky contents such as, chat rooms, web mails, Internet games, weather, news, blogs etc. on their websites, for the purpose of getting Web surfers to return to their websites, or to hold the attention of the Web surfers and get them to spend longer period of time on their websites. Further, sticky content published on the website results in exposure of the Web surfers to a company's overt or subtle messages, increased sales of products and services on the website and a decrease in time that a Web surfer spends on the web pages of competitors of the company. With the increased use of social networking sites such as Facebook, companies have become more concerned about the stickiness of their social web pages as well.
Traditionally, companies and organizations with web pages determine the stickiness of their web pages by measuring the time that a Web surfer spends on the web page, and in which interval he or she returns to that page. A company or an organization would also greatly benefit from information about web surfing habits of their web page visitors when these visitors are not on the company's or organization's web page. For example, a company may be interested in understanding how much time a Web surfer spends on a competitor's web page, or what makes the Web surfer migrate from the company's web page to the competitor's web page. Further, other important questions may include which competitor does the Web surfer go to most of the time when defecting from the company's web page, and which one the least, who is really the online competition, and what exactly does the Web surfer do on competitors' pages, where, when, and how often, and where do new Web surfers come from mostly, i.e., come from as in whose pages do they come from, to the company's page. This type of information is generally unavailable to a company. However, a company or organization with a presence on a public social network, for example, a Facebook page, is likely interested in analogous questions and such information can be gleaned from the public social network. Here, the company may be interested in the visitors of its Facebook page and the visitors' activities on the Facebook pages of the company's competition or of companies with complementary products and services.
There is thus a need for a system and method to provide more detailed information about the sequence of actions and activities of social network users when visiting a social networking site, in order to improve customer retention, prevent customer defection, and ultimately provide improved customer satisfaction. Public social networks typically provide access to activities on the social network through an application programming interface (API), and thus allow third parties insights into some of the social network activities of its social media users. The data retrieved from such an API can serve as the basis for answering the above questions that a company is interested in.